Hey, folks! This is Bryan Yarrow, Combat Systems Lead on Guild Wars 2®, and I'm here to talk to you about something really exciting that's coming with the first major update to Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity™ early next year. As we announced in July, we're merging the Strike Mission and the raid game modes into a single game mode, which will just be called raids. We'll be releasing another blog on this topic in the coming months with more granular details, but today I want to focus on why we're doing this and how we got here.
Why Merge Strikes and Raids?
Strike Missions were originally designed to help players transition from open-world content into raid content. They were intended to be quicker to complete than a full raid wing and have slightly less complicated mechanics as well. Over time, our data indicated that Strike Missions weren't performing as the content bridge we were hoping for. When we dug into the details of why this was happening, we found a number of reasons that we believed were all contributing factors, and we've been attempting to address these over our past few expansions.
When we looked at who was playing Strike Missions and why, we discovered that inexperienced players had low engagement with Strike Missions. Furthermore, players who wanted to raid still felt blocked due to difficulty concerns and challenges in finding a group to run them with. Strike Missions simply weren't being viewed as the stepping stone to raids that we originally intended.
Since then, we've tried to reframe and clarify how difficulty levels work in our group-instanced content across both Strike Mission and raid game modes. Normal mode should be able to be completed by anyone interested in learning the content, while challenge mode is aimed toward our hardcore audience. We also have some plans, which we'll tease below, that will further clarify the intended difficulty levels of raids for players.
Raids: Encounters and Wings
As we made plans to improve Strike Mission engagement, we came to realize that strikes and raids didn't need to be separate game modes at all. They were both squad-based instanced content with similar levels of complexity. Raid wings were just longer and tended to have a bit more complexity per encounter than Strike Missions did. We were also paying some hidden costs by separating them, such as each mode having its own separate reward system that didn't incentivize cross-engagement. Not to mention that it was confusing for new players!
Strike Missions will be known as raid encounters going forward and will be siblings with the current raid wings within the larger raids game mode. This should make it easier for newer players to understand and approach.
Raiding in 2026
Combining these game modes offers us the opportunity to do much more than making things simpler to understand. In our first major update for Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, we'll also be adding the following to raids:
- A new raid UI with quality-of-life improvements (see screenshot below).
- A list of all raid wings and raid encounters will allow you to go directly to the boss you want to tackle.
- The list includes encounter difficulty ratings to inform players.
- Quickplay mode to assist players in finding a group for easier raid encounters.
- A merged reward system for strikes and raid wings.
- A new Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity raid encounter with a challenge mode (a second raid encounter, a challenge mode, and a legendary mode will come in subsequent updates).
These features will allow us to better communicate difficulty levels for raids and address the significant quality-of-life issues that depress engagement. And, as many of you have correctly surmised, the quickplay mode feature that we debuted in beta form for the Fractal Incursion bonus event will indeed be added to raids next year to help players find groups for the easiest raid encounters. We're very excited to see how the community engages with our merged raid game mode, and we'll share more details on how this will all work in the coming months. Happy gaming!